Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined

This article was taken from the August issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and
started walking to the American Museum of the
Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson,
then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a
movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she
noticed that the payphones were ringing -- all four of them. "You
forget payphones exist," recalls Robinson. "That was the first
thing I noticed." She picked one up: all she could hear were
fragments of a conversation, "sounds of madness". Outside the
cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing
out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into
Robinson's hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film.
The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a
given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving "weird
text messages"; phones were ringing.

The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother's house and
starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson
found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: "Do you
want to play a game?", along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She
typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that
continued the story. "In the middle of it, the phone rang," she
says. She recognised the voice. It was the film's "hooded villain".
He started asking questions: "Do you feel guilty? Have you ever
lost consciousness?" Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her
darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through
her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept
clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text:
"Where are you going? We're not finished yet…" At that point,
Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers
who had just gone through the same experience. "We were all like,
'What the fuck was that?' It was totally nuts."

Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of
mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head
Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on
the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature.
Based on the participants' responses to the automated phone calls,
audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a
fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old
New Yorker, the experience "demonstrated the fluidity of an
audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home."

This is transmedia storytelling. Large studios and broadcasters,
as well as independent filmmakers such as Weiler, are building
fictional worlds that smash through their frames on to multiple
platforms. Unlike quick promotional spin-offs, this new type of
tie-in extends, rather than adapts, storylines. It tells various
parts of the story using distinct media, exploiting the qualities
unique to each platform. So when you watch a TV show, you might
follow a sub-plot that spills on to the web, then read the dénouement in a graphic novel. Yes, writers have long
created worlds that go beyond the page -- L Frank Baum did as much
with his 1900 novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, whose
story world he expanded into a musical and other books. But today's
transmedia producers are planning for multiple platforms from the
start. They design fictional universes that are consistent however
the audience engages.

The trend is already reconfiguring the industry, affecting
everything from how stories are made, down to titles on business
cards. In April, the Producers Guild of America, which represents
production staff in TV, film and online, ratified a new credit:
transmedia producer, which codified these characteristics. Jeff
Gomez, a videogame producer, was instrumental in pushing the
credit: in 2000, after becoming excited by the multiplatform genre,
he had left his job as an editor at Acclaim Entertainment to start
Starlight Runner, a transmedia production company. After he
successfully extended the Hot Wheels brand across
videogames, TV and film in 2003, a string of Hollywood studios
asked him to create multiplatform worlds for the likes of
Pirates Of The Caribbean, Avatar and Tron
2. This side of the Atlantic, broadcasters are taking the
lead, using transmedia to invigorate small-screen titles such as
Emmerdale and Doctor Who. In a world of
multichoice TV, mobile and the web, competition for viewers has
never been greater, and audience attention never more fragmented.
That's why many content creators are betting that transmedia will
focus it once again.